Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmarcos | Hacker News Reader

If stories (and AAA games in general) are bland in games is due in large part to how expensive are to produce. Risk tolerance is low.

If game assets are cheap to generate you’ll see small teams or even solo developers willing to take more creative risks

View on HN

Counter point: you’d see a corresponding exponential increase in QA labor, and just like with the web, Steam will be absolutely flooded with slop.

So I see the most likely outcome is a lot of dogshit and Steam being forced to make draconian moves to protect the integrity of the store.

QAing a game built on a framework where fundamental mechanics are non-deterministic and context-sensitive sounds like a special kind of hell. Not to mention that once you find a bug there's no way to fix it directly, since the source code is an opaque blob of weights, so you just have to RLHF it until it eventually behaves.

And meanwhile you’ve used up .1% of humanity’s remaining carbon budget on each round.

Seems like there's already a lot of slop on steam and I really doubt it will be difficult for quality content to be highlighted even if the amount of games increases 1000x or more

Yeah. Video and Youtube is an example. Filtering is not a hard problem. Mega tons of bad stuff doesn’t bother me.

Love that Youtube filter that spits out what I should consume. Thank you corporate algorithm for telling me what is a good thing to watch

You can subscribe to the channels you like and ignore the rest.

That has been the case since art was first industrialized with the printing press. Most of them don’t survive but a significant fraction, if not the vast majority, of books printed in the first century were trashy novels about King Arthur and other fantasies (we know from publisher records and bibliographies that they were very popular but don’t have detailed sales figures to compare against older content like translated Greek classics). Only a small fraction of content created since then has been preserved because most of it was slop. The good stuff made it into the Western canon over centuries but most of the stuff that survives from that time period were family bibles and archaic translations.

I don’t see why AI will be any different. All that’s changed is ratio of potential creators to the general population. Most of it is going to be slop regardless because of economic incentives.

Sturgeon's law says 90% of everything is crap.

If AI pushes that up to 98%, that means you have to look through 5 times as much crap to get the good stuff.

Exactly, “it’s bad now” != “it won’t get worse”.

Are game ratings reliable on Steam? If yes, then it will be easy to avoid the slop. Or are they overrun with clickbots, like Amazon, where people give five stars for some crap product?

Or you'll see a flood of shit that's impossible to filter.

Thanks to high bandwidth Internet, YouTube and smartphones is easier than ever to produce and distribute high quality video. So much good stuff coming from it.

Expect something similar if video games, interactive 3D is cheap to produce.

Filtering is a much easier problem to solve and abundance a preferable scenario.

We already have deluges of free, and almost free, publicly available assets. Getting Over It, a game that deliberately used those, had a running author's commentary on the this phenomenon and in short no, endless assets does not translate to endless creative works; it's seen and treated as trash that nobody wants to use.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com